Satirist, Louis CK did a bit on the Conan O’Brien show a few years ago called “Everything is Amazing and Nobody is Happy” that has become a viral YouTube clip. I find myself silently quoting him to myself when faced with air travel delays.

This is a portion of the transcript:

People come back from flights and they tell you their story, like a horror story. They act like their flight was like a cattle car in the 40’s in Germany. “It was the worst day of my life. First of all we didn’t board for 20 minutes and then we get on the plane and they made us sit there on the runway for 40 minutes. We had to sit there” –

Oh really, what happened next? Did you fly through the air incredibly like a bird? Did you partake in the miracle of human flight, you non-contributing zero? Wow, you’re flying! It’s amazing! Everybody on every plane should just constantly be going, oh my God, wow you’re flying, you’re sitting in a chair in the sky but it doesn’t go back a lot. New York to California in 5 hours. That used to take 30 years to do that and a bunch of you would die on the way there and have a baby. You’d be with a whole different group of people by the time you got there. -Louis CK

Paul Simon has provided the soundtrack for many of our lives. Recently he released a new album, which has gotten great reviews and is currently embarked on a brief tour playing in intimate nightclubs.

Last week in in Toronto, Rayna Ford, a fan from Newfoundland, called out for Simon to play “Duncan,” and said something to the effect that she learned to play guitar on the song. In a moment of astonishment and disbelief, Paul Simon invited her on stage, handed her a guitar and asked her to play it for the crowd. When she strapped on the guitar, the audience went crazy.

In a few strums, the band played along, tears ran down Rayna Ford’s cheeks and Simon stood by her side in smiles. It was an absolute moment of sobbing joy for Ford, a moment so beautiful, so human – void of scripts, management or commercialism.

Have you ever been so overwhelmed by beauty/mastery that you actually contemplate ending your life?

Bay Area artist (via New England) Merrill Garbus’s (one woman band, tUnE-YaRdS) is so intimidatingly smart I feel guilty listening or at least unworthy – this is not music intended for us (human beings) – it’s simply too lateral thinking too concept-dense, full-up of mashed up binary details that I know I could never fully appreciate. Most good artists “think outside the box” or “color outside the lines” but tUnE-YaRdS redraws the lines, I’m pretty sure she’s an alien.

I listen to her disc and I feel darkly confident akin to carrying a sign that read ‘I know I’m fucking up – leave me alone.’”

This is an older clip that I never tire of. It’s as smart(dark) as it is funny (twisted). Absolutely worth eight minutes of your time. Note to my more conservative readers, this video is not as lewd as the title suggests, you’ll enjoy!